


The Nightmare Recurring

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:58:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prokopenko is resurrected as a dream and his first week of sleep is anything but restful. For <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/weesaw/pseuds/weesaw">weesaw</a>, because who else?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nightmare Recurring

It didn’t matter where the dreams started. 

He ran out of his childhood bedroom to answer his mother’s call. He pulled himself out of a summer bright pool, water falling away from him into the dirt. He broke away from a kiss to find himself alone. He ran through the forest playing a years old game of hide and seek, always hiding and never seeking.

There was a moment at every juncture where he blinked and then he was back there. He always ended up there. Inside of himself and outside of himself, aware of how out of place he looked on their abandoned race track in his pajamas or his swimsuit or his Aglionby uniform. His footsteps kicked up small clouds of dust that rose about his ankles, sticking to new wet skin, glowing in the floodlights, stark against the black that had fallen.

It was not night. It was black. Deep like a cave. Dark like a basement theater after the projector’s cut off. Infinite like the backs of his eyelids when he was chasing sleep. And once the black had settled, out of it there came whiteness.

Kavinsky: ribbed tank top, skin stretched across slender shoulders, teeth bared as a predator preparing to snap at a neck, eyes clear and burning, glowing like the dust.

He appeared from nowhere and Prokopenko did not question it, because he knew that Kavinsky existed outside of all of them. He did not abide any law or natural order. He refused to be told what was possible. He created reality around him as he went, breathing them all into existence as they were needed. As he needed them, not as they needed to be.

The first night Prokopenko moved forward to greet his brother, seeking to complete their ritual. He held out his hand and Kavinsky walked past it, pressed his lips to Prokopenko’s lips and something cold to his temple. Then Prokopenko was awake in his dorm, sweating and gasping for air.

The second night Prokopenko didn’t move, thought if he was patient the dream wouldn’t react to him in anger. He waited and watched and saw the gun, braced himself against those lips and waited for oblivion. When he woke his blood burned through him and he prayed for it to stop.

The third night he took several steps back, but Kavinsky moved like a cat, like a dragon. Prokopenko didn’t know how Kavinsky was warping the distance. How he moved faster with the same movements as Prokopenko was trying for. Step for step until Prokopenko tipped backward onto the track and the gun landed between his eyes. He woke up in convulsions, body working out the epithets he couldn’t get past his lips.

The fourth night Prokopenko turned to run and he heard it, the bullet tearing through the air and his fear. Moving as he was it missed its mark and then he was laying in the dust, bleeding onto the concrete, trying to focus on Kavinsky’s glowing white shoes in the floodlight as the red seeped ever closer but never managed to mar his killer. When he woke up his sheets were wet with spreading sweat.

On the fifth night he lunged forward, ready to fight, finally believing himself worthy of survival. All that whiteness turned to smoke. In his hands Kavinsky was just a ghost even as he grasped at his thin pale throat. But the barrel of the gun was real as it bit into his jaw and there was a second of searing heat before his memory lapsed. Awake he reached for a thought buzzing in the back of his throat he couldn’t pin down with his tongue no matter how he tried.

On the sixth night he dropped to his knees and begged in a way he hoped would appeal to Kavinsky’s vanity. He offered up any part of himself he thought he could parcel off with a breaking voice and Kavinsky only smiled, a hound familiar with the scent of the blood he was after and said in a whisper, ‘you are already mine.’ He placed the gun against Prokopenko’s tongue and said ‘watch your teeth.’ In the normal dark after Prokopenko clutched at himself unbelieving, because he remembered what death felt like and he couldn’t remember why.

On the seventh night Prokopenko gave in. He wrapped himself around the stark, beautiful ghost of the lethal boy he had known. Pressed his face into his neck, pressed his lips to his collar bone as Kavinsky pressed the freezing metal to his temple. There it slid into place as if it had always belonged against him, as if it was inevitable. Prokopenko crushed the thin body against him, cold and pliable as it was, and waited for his own blood to warm it. He awoke to his own body in bliss and his face wet. He wished for every night to be the first night made again so he didn’t have to know.

**Author's Note:**

> I quite like this and I keep losing it on Tumblr, so just throwing it up here for safe keeping. Hi, my name is KL and I have Too Many Feelings about Prokopenko.


End file.
